Cont: Trans Women are not Women 4

[LondonJohn]

Just stop. This has been clarified multiple times, so please quit ignoring it and pretending that it's something else.

The argument is against self-declaration alone as sufficient to entitle a male-bodied person to be treated as if they were female.

The are relevant questions that have been asked in the context of self-declaration, and ignored:

• How does one differentiate between a self-declared transwoman who presents as male and a cismale?
• How does one differentiate between a malicious cisman in a dress and a genuine transwoman who doesn't pass very well?
• On what basis do you assume that the rates of sexual violence and aggression for male-bodied transwomen are materially different from those of male-bodied cismen?

Just because you keep ignoring these questions doesn't make them nonexistent. And just because you keep reframing this as if females are irrationally and hysterically afraid of transwomen specifically (rather than very reasonably skeptical of males in general) doesn't magically change the argument into that.

For a less polite approach, allow me to say: Quit ******* misrepresenting other people's arguments. If you keep erecting all of these goddamned strawmen, you're going to set the whole ******* forum alight.

Remember, we're only supposed to address others' arguments - no matter how much we disagree with them - with calm and sober responses. Right? I remember someone pointing that out once.....

Firstly, as you yourself have now been told multiple times, self-declaration/self-id does not simply entail someone spontaneously declaring themselves to be of a different gender. Even self-id would involve a legal step, and a legal validation.

Secondly, your claim that your argument has only ever been about self-id is total bunkum and nonsense. Many times have you stated that trans women with penises should not be allowed in (eg) women's changing rooms. Plenty of trans women who have been through medical assessment and diagnosis will have chosen not to have surgery (or any medication treatment either, for that matter). Those trans women will have had nothing whatsoever to do with self-identification/self-declaration, yet you explicitly want to keep these people out of women's changing rooms anyway.


Any thoughts? (Try to keep your response calm though, please)

 

[TurkeysGhost]

So... that's a yes then? You DO believe that all the statistics are made up overreactions by hysterical females?

No, I fully understand that men are frequent sexual aggressors of women and commit a wide variety of crime against them.

I don't think this justifies categorical discrimination against trans women.

 

[LondonJohn]

Study suggests that transwomen exhibit a male pattern of criminality

Against cis women (is the only relevant factor)

Try again.


(Oh and I wonder whether a website called fairplayforwomen.com might have any agenda or bias LOL)

(Oh and (2), that study is laughably statistically insignificant. You really ought to have been able to spot that....)

(Oh and (3), maybe you ought to read the piece right at the end of that webpage as well....)

 

[Emily's Cat]

By the way, and as a policy/law suggestion:

Once the law changes in all right-thinking countries to allow all transgender people to use the gender-segregates spaces which match their trans gender (as will happen),

laws on things like physical and sexual assault could be amended/addended to include a more severe offence (with more severe sentencing guidelines) if a person enters a gender-segregated space which doesn't match their own gender identification, and commits a physical or sexual assault while within that space.

This does nothing at all to prevent those assaults from happening. You're still increasing the risk to females in spaces where at present they face near to zero risk.

Sexual assaults are already hard to get taken seriously, they're already difficult to prove and to get police to take action against the perpetrators.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Firstly, as you yourself have now been told multiple times, self-declaration/self-id does not simply entail someone spontaneously declaring themselves to be of a different gender. Even self-id would involve a legal step, and a legal validation.

No. Just no! Stop this, it's dishonest. You and AGG keep trying to foist a very limited very specific UK definition on the rest of us. And every time you've been corrected on what the rest of us are actually talking about, you just fall back to this very narrow UK legal version as if that makes you right.

FFS, I even changed the terms in order to avoid this problem. Reread my post. I'm not talking about Self-ID, I'm very clearly talking about self-declaration, which is not the same thing. You slapping a / in there doesn't make them synonymous. And your pigeon hole debate definition is irrelevant to this discussion.

 

[Emily's Cat]

No, I fully understand that men are frequent sexual aggressors of women and commit a wide variety of crime against them.

I don't think this justifies categorical discrimination against trans women.

Do you think it justifies segregated spaces for biological females, when those spaces leave biological females particularly vulnerable to sexual aggression by biological males?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Against cis women (is the only relevant factor)

Try again.


(Oh and I wonder whether a website called fairplayforwomen.com might have any agenda or bias LOL)

(Oh and (2), that study is laughably statistically insignificant. You really ought to have been able to spot that....)

(Oh and (3), maybe you ought to read the piece right at the end of that webpage as well....)

Of course I would.

No, he wouldn't.

 

[TomB]

Yes, I do. It's strange that people can't get their head around what is a very simple analogy. I'm trying not to assume they are thick so I think what they are doing is pretending not to see what's right under their nose because it suits their argument. I suppose it's possible that they are so emotional on the topic that they actually are blinded to what is right under their nose but I find that hard to believe.

Some people just have problems understanding analogies I guess.

The analogy only really works if you look at two groups (trans-women and cis-women) in isolation. Then you can frame it as breaking down or removing the barrier of segregation. The argument for this is that the reason for the segregation is invalid and therefore the segregation should be abandoned.

But if you broaden the view two include cis-men (and trans-men, but we seem to ignore them) the nature of the analogy changes. It is no longer about removing segregation, but redefining the terms of the segregation. This sounds minor, but it is not. It completely changes the analysis criteria of the proposed change.

It is no longer about fairness. It accepts as a starting point that segregation is desirable and justified, but that the grouping criteria should change. (This is significantly different than arguing that the groupings should be eliminated.) To make such an argument, you have to explain why the reasoning or goals of the segregation are better met with the new criteria.

The analyses of the two situations are not the same.

What I've been reading is that the "anti-trans" side is willing to accept trans people into their spaces provided there is some mechanism that allows them to feel confident in excluding cis-men.

Arguments have been made that there are few trans-women who assault women in bathrooms/locker rooms or that there are currently few instances of cis-men taking advantage of the opportunity to do so.

My answer to that is simply this (gasp) analogy: I'm a programmer. I am aware that there is a vulnerability in my program that would allow a user to do something that I don't want them to. But so far no one has done so. Should I wait until the vulnerability is exploited to address the vulnerability, or should I be proactive and address it up front?

It seems to me that it's not trans people that Emily's Cat, for instance, really wants to keep out of her locker room. It's cis-men like myself...or people of questionable trans status or behavior like Jessica Yaniv. The admittedly few cases that have been cited don't illustrate widespread exploitation of a vulnerability, but they do demonstrate that the vulnerability exists.

Perhaps a better goal would be to address a system that both shifts the line of segregation where appropriate and prevents the exploitation of the vulnerability. Interestingly, LondonJohn and Emily's Cat are not far apart on this particular issue, though I've never seen LondonJohn acknowledge this.

There are more than two sides to this issue. It's too complicated to label someone as pro-trans or anti-trans and all of the insults and hate speak that goes along with it.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Do you think it justifies segregated spaces for biological females, when those spaces leave biological females particularly vulnerable to sexual aggression by biological males?

Perhaps in some circumstances. Is there any evidence that non-segregated train couchettes are lousy with sexual violence? My brief googling leads me to believe that thieves are the chief security concern when sleeping in these bunk type arrangements. Overnight train travel is very rare in the US, so I admit I'm a bit unfamiliar with the practical concerns of sleeper cars.

It's important to remember than many segregated spaces are probably more to do with puritanical views of the genders and much less to do with safety.

 

[LondonJohn]

No. Just no! Stop this, it's dishonest. You and AGG keep trying to foist a very limited very specific UK definition on the rest of us. And every time you've been corrected on what the rest of us are actually talking about, you just fall back to this very narrow UK legal version as if that makes you right.

FFS, I even changed the terms in order to avoid this problem. Reread my post. I'm not talking about Self-ID, I'm very clearly talking about self-declaration, which is not the same thing. You slapping a / in there doesn't make them synonymous. And your pigeon hole debate definition is irrelevant to this discussion.

No, how about you reread the rest of my post, and respond to all of it rather than the selectively clipped part?

In particular, how about you give an answer to the fact that a) you tried to claim that this was only ever about self-id issues, yet b) you have many times stated that you believe trans women with penises should not be allowed into women's changing rooms (when, of course, many such trans women could reasonably have gone down the route of clinical assessment, diagnosis and treatment)?

Or would you rather not address the bit where you drive a coach and horses through your own argument?

 

[LondonJohn]

Not sure why you're not understanding that what you posted was statistically-insignificant analysis, discredited elsewhere, posted via an activist organisation....

....and which didn't address the only relevant issue, which is the propensity of trans women to carry out violent (sex or physical) assaults upon cis women?


Any thoughts, or other (better) attempts?

 

[LondonJohn]

No, he wouldn't. Every time information and data is presented that doesn't fit his narrative, he dismisses it as "anecdotal" or "biased" or "fringe cases" or just pretends it doesn't exist. Like, literally not responding to the posts that have that information in them and acting as if nothing were ever posted at all...

What was that about guessing others' minds?


(And I'd be grateful if you could remind me where/when I have - as you claim - "dismisse(d) (information and data) as "anecdotal" or "biased" or "fringe cases" or just pretend(ed) it doesn't exist.". Many thanks!)

 

[d4m10n]

Yeah.....when you have reliable data on the per-capita adjusted prevalence of sex attacks against (cis) women by males who choose to identify as women*..... come back to us and we can discuss this alleged threat to women from trans women (because, remember, the alleged threat from trans women is the only thing that's relevant here, not the threat from all males)

Is there some compelling reason to believe that the subset of "all males" we're talking about here is significantly less prone to sexual violence than other adult human males?

Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk

 

[LondonJohn]

Is there some compelling reason to believe that the subset of "all males" we're talking about here is significantly less prone to sexual violence than other adult human males?

Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk

I don't understand what you're saying here.

The subset here is "those males who identify as women"; and the question is around what propensity this subset has to commit sex/physical assaults upon women, compared with the main set of "all males".

 

[d4m10n]

The subset here is "those males who identify as women"; and the question is around what propensity this subset has to commit sex/physical assaults upon women, compared with the main set of "all males".

Why shouldn't our background knowledge about the set of "all males" inform our (Bayesian) priors as to the specific subset of human males at issue here?

Suppose we were asked whether men of Taíno descent are more prone to sexual violence than their biological sisters. Could we make a decent guess based on our observations of men and women in other parts of the world?

ETA: One could extend LJ's reasoning to allow basically any subgroup of human males into spaces hitherto reserved for human females. Bears fans? Never seen a study on whether they are as prone to violence as men in general. Men in red ballcaps? No studies. American-born Francophiles? No studies. Let them all in, I say. /s

 

[Emily's Cat]

It seems to me that it's not trans people that Emily's Cat, for instance, really wants to keep out of her locker room. It's cis-men like myself...or people of questionable trans status or behavior like Jessica Yaniv. The admittedly few cases that have been cited don't illustrate widespread exploitation of a vulnerability, but they do demonstrate that the vulnerability exists.

What's interesting to me is that Boudicca90 also want's to keep out cis-men and people of questionable trans status. That suggests that it shouldn't be all that difficult to find common ground and a guidelines that is reasonable. It gets more complicated when people who aren't impacted by this at all (ST and AGG and LJ) insist that no such compromise is available, and that there can be no discussion.

 

[Darat]

Are you assuming that females as a group don't care about privacy, rights, or dignity relative to males who identify as women? Or that safety and the shocking volume of sexual assaults against females really only matters to a few females?



Which "some" are you arbitrarily deciding are "extreme" here?

The extremists.

 

[Darat]

What on earth do you think it means, other than biological sex? Or are you arguing that sex was made to be a protected class in order to protect the rights of males and to address their disadvantages and prevent males from being discriminated against?

In English and Welsh equality legislation sex refers to both female and male, the law is "sex neutral".

 

[LondonJohn]

Why shouldn't our background knowledge about the set of "all males" inform our (Bayesian) priors as to the specific subset of human males at issue here?

Suppose we were asked whether men of Taíno descent are more prone to sexual violence than their biological sisters. Could we make a decent guess based on our observations of men and women in other parts of the world?

ETA: One could extend LJ's reasoning to allow basically any subgroup of human males into spaces hitherto reserved for human females. Bears fans? Never seen a study on whether they are as prone to violence as men in general. Men in red ballcaps? No studies. American-born Francophiles? No studies. Let them all in, I say. /s

Nonsense. The subset of "all males" which is labelled "those males who identify as women" is clearly radically different from, say, a subset labelled "those males who support the Chicago Bears", when it comes to an analysis of the propensity to launch sexual (especially) or physical assaults upon females.


But, as I say, let's see the (reliable, statistically-significant) data. You may be right - though I very strongly doubt it - that trans women show much the same propensity as the whole set of "all males" on this particular matter. If that's the case, then of course my mindset will alter accordingly.

 

[Darat]

No, Darat. It's SuburbanTurkey who is equivocating here. He's the one who has recast safety, privacy, and rights to be "discomfort". He's the one who has consistently denigrated the safety risks that females are concerned about and framed them as bigotry.



So if you want to point fingers at someone playing disingenuous linguistic games, you're currently pointing the wrong direction.

Nope that is definitely your false equivilance and your redefinition of the word discomfort.